One or more aspects relate, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to facilitating such processing.
Processing within a computing environment includes performing operations, and some of those operations employ arithmetic. There are different types of arithmetic, including, for example, floating point, decimal floating point, binary, and hexadecimal arithmetic, to name a few. Each type of arithmetic uses a specific representation. For instance, floating point arithmetic uses a formulaic representation of real numbers as an approximation to support a trade-off between range and precision. Floating point arithmetic is used by floating point operations.
To manage floating point operations within a computing environment, a floating point control and/or status register is provided. As examples, a floating point control/status register includes floating point controls, such as, for instance, mask bits, flag bits, data exception code and rounding mode fields, to control floating point operations within a computing environment.
Currently, two approaches for managing the floating point controls are used, including updating the floating point control/status register, which requires serialization to be performed to stop processing in order to update the controls; and a floating point control register renaming process which is expensive in implementation.